


Between the Elements of Air and Earth

by thallo



Category: Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:28:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thallo/pseuds/thallo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Viola/Cesario/Sebastian and Olivia tease out and test out their separate (?) identities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Elements of Air and Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wanderlustlover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/gifts).



> A Yuletide gift for wanderlustlover, who requested a character study of Viola/Sebastian/Olivia and the connections between them. The brackets are meant to offer the same kinds of alternatives and possibilities that the characters themselves do here.

What she wants to say is, "make me a willow cabin at your gate," but she won't; those are not her words. Or better: those _are_ her words; those words were given to her, they belong to her now. She cannot send them after him as she sent the ring.

What she says is, "wouldst thou be ruled by me!"

And what Sebastian hears is, "I would make me a willow cabin at your gate," that the words are doubled over like a fold of cloth, concealing the interior. He sees her bare imploring face and he sees her veil and thinks that each are the key to the other--layers over layers. He sees himself split--himself as he is and himself as she sees him--as if reflected in two opposing mirrors, Sebastian and not-Sebastian echoing over and over again. For the first time since he has lost Viola, he feels not entirely alone.

"Madam, I will," Sebastian and not-Sebastian says.

***

Fragments. Blinding white sun beats down on blinding white sand one brutal August afternoon on the coast of [Messaline/Illyria/anywhere]. Viola and Sebastian are standing in the surf.

"Look," one of them says--does it matter which? "My footprints are the same size as yours. And the same shape."

The other laughs.

"They aren't; that's never how it works."

But it is. Viola puts her foot into the slight depression left in the sand, and her toes re-form the very pattern that is just now shifting, the [whorls/strands/drops] of water chased away by the snug fit of form into echo. Just next to her Sebastian does the same with her footprint. They are a perfect match.

***

When Sebastian and Viola lose each other in the sea, the loss is [total/entire/apocalyptic]. If the other is gone, then so is the self; the only cure for Viola is to become what she has lost. She steps into her brother's clothes as she stepped into his footprints so many years ago, but this time it is a vigil. She calls herself Cesario--letters that place her halfway between the future of Orsino and the constantly-erupting past of Sebastian.

And when she sees the veiled and stately woman in mourning for her own brother, her own fresh pain twists in her chest. She aches for Olivia and for herself, for the grief of the girl she is not, who she chose to annihilate to resurrect her brother in her own poor way.

Olivia sees her, this girl and not-girl who stepped out of her skin into a new body, and she wants so hard it hurts. Cesario is liminal in every way; he stands at every threshold there is: male and female, desiring and desired, alive and dead. And he stands at hers. How can Olivia--who never crosses a threshold herself--resist this?

***  
a shift, slightly: this is the way the story goes. but so is this. and this. and this.

***  
The beach again.  
“All right,” says Olivia. “My turn, now.” Letters shift and skid across each other and tumble, and Olivia takes Viola’s place next to Sebastian.  
“But your feet--” he starts to say. Stops when she looks at him.  
“See,” she says. “My footprint fits too.”  
Sebastian has to look again. The [coincidence/oddity/miracle] of Viola’s footprint would be enough, he thinks, but now Olivia too. Maybe the footprints molded themselves to her feet, he thinks. Maybe she makes them new.  
“Now you, Cesario,” she says. He doesn’t correct her. “Step into my footprints.”  
He does as she bids, and he’s not surprised when the sand gives like a whisper between his toes. Another perfect fit.

***  
“Not like that,” Olivia says, frowning. “What do you want to put that there for? You’ve got to move it higher.”  
Sebastian-Cesario sighs.  
“This isn’t easy,” he says, mopping sweat from his brow. “I’ve never done this before, and it’s not like it comes with instructions.”  
“Anyone would know you can’t nail the lintel together before you’ve measured the frame, though,” Olivia retorts. Viola and not-Viola is standing on the threshold, watching silently. Sebastian-Cesario is sitting just outside the gate, surrounded by the wreckage of broken willow beams and the ghost of a rough structure. Sweat drips from his forehead and his hands are red from digging splinters out all day.  
“I don’t know how to make this like you’d imagined,” he says, talking about the cabin and not talking about the cabin. Olivia looks at him.  
“You said you would.”  
“That’s not quite true,” Viola-Cesario breaks in from the threshold. “I said I would make a willow cabin at your gate, and I also said I am not what I play. But he is--or he nearly is--and he’s trying.”  
Olivia very nearly crosses her arms; of course it would be Viola to tease out the thread of difference between the three of them.  
“That doesn’t fix the problem of the cabin,” she replies grumpily, circling warily around the truth-and-not-truth Viola is speaking of.  
“Look,” says Viola. “You know what you want. You have always known what you want. If you can make that reality, you’re happiest. So why don’t you come out? Why don’t you cross the threshold already and acknowledge what you want? We have. Why don’t you?”  
“I can’t,” Olivia says, and she means it.  
“ _Olivia_ can’t,” says Viola-Cesario. “But you can.”  
“I don’t understand.”  
“I’ll go in and be Olivia--I’m so close to being her anyways--and you can come out here and be Cesario and build yourself the cabin that you want. Olivia hasn’t left the house, and Sebastian drowned and came back as Cesario, and Viola [died/drowned/was erased]--all these things are true. They can still be true. We just switch roles.”  
Olivia/Viola smiles. After all, the only difference between them is an _I_ , the presence or absence of a separate self.  
“All right,” she says, and crosses over.

***  
They are asleep, all four of them together, all tangles of flowing hair and lanky limbs covered with a fine down. Olivia has gone to bed first, her form stretched out small and alone across the wide gulf of the sheets. Viola climbs in shortly after; she faces Olivia, so close their foreheads could nearly touch, and drapes her own thin arm across Olivia’s torso, keeping a small space between their bodies. There is a distance between the women that feels like a promise. Sebastian joins them next, on the other side of Olivia with his other arm draped over her, and now Olivia is surrounded by Viola-Cesario-Sebastian until she imagines that she’s merged with them, that she’s lost the _I_ that sometimes keeps her separate from Viola in the waking hours.

And at that moment is when Orsino enters, lies down next to Viola at a slight remove from the indistinguishable tangle of limbs on the center of the bed, and places his hand on her hip. He is tangent to this [kinship/union/bond] that [Sebastian-Viola-Olivia] [share/create/embody]; he has a space next to but not within. Orsino understands this and does not begrudge it; he cannot fathom how the balance works, only that it is. They fall asleep like this, night after night, Orsino’s hand on a hip--he cannot tell whose--to the strains of Feste’s voice in the hall downstairs.

“But when I came at last to wive...”, the clown sings, and if there is real pathos in his voice the four upstairs are insensible to it and to the storm that lashes the walls outside.


End file.
